Database Rights

So, if you pay someone to collect data and put it into a database, then you own the database rights on that database for the next 15 years (in the EU at least). If you then offer access to the database on a web site, people can query it and use the information they got out of it, but they’re not allowed to download the entire database and share it with others. Also, making another web site that forwards queries to yours and returns the results is not allowed.

For instance, if you pay someone to scan a large number of newspaper articles and put them into a database, then you get to own the database rights to that database (because you paid to make it). However, each individual article is also protected by copyright, which is owned by the newspaper. Simple facts cannot be copyrighted however, so e.g. individual measurements in a database of sensor data are not protected.

Permission to extract and reuse substantial parts of a database can be given to others by the owner of the database rights via a license. Starting with version 4.0, the well-known Creative Commons (CC) licenses include a grant of database rights, making them suitable for use with databases. There is also the Open Database License, which predates CC 4.0, and has a more academic origin.